Food security v energy security: land use conflict and the law

by Dr Tina Hunter, Assistant Professor of Law at Bond University, a member of the Legal Culture Research Group and the Research Group for Natural Resources, Environment and Development Law at the University of Bergen, Norway and a FAQ Research writer.

It’s election time … you’re at the local café, reading the paper, while you sip on a caramel latte and a lovely serve of bacon and eggs on wholegrain toast … sounds like the perfect way to spend a Sunday morning. However, everything that you have in front of you — including the printing of the paper, the delivery of the food to your cafe, and the gas that cooked your food and heated the water for the coffee, is the subject of huge conflict at present.

Both of these forms of security are paramount to the survival and growth of Australia. Food security so that we may feed ourselves (and a hungry world), and energy security for transport, heating, lighting and various other activities that we enjoy at present.

How is conflict resolved, and what role does the law play?

What happens when there is a perceived conflict between these two vital forms of security? Should one give way to the other, can they happily co-exist, or is it the role of the law to create a framework where the interests of both are protected?

It is these difficult questions that governments, especially NSW and Queensland, are facing at present. The development of unconventional sources of gas (such as coal seam and shale gas) is providing Australia with energy security, as well as generating a huge export industry in the form of LNG.

Unlike most traditional mining activity, CSG is often found on highly fertile agricultural land

However, many of the coal seam gas deposits occur in areas of high agricultural fertility. This includes the fertile Darling Downs area in Queensland, and the Liverpool Plains in NSW, which comprises only 6% of Australia’s total agricultural area but produces more than 22% of its food.

This is Australia’s breadbasket.

Conflict over land use and concerns over fracking

This creates conflict in land use; farmers are understandably reluctant to allow their prime agricultural land to be used for coal seam gas extraction. However, as the law stands at present, even if a farmer owns the land, a government has the right to grant a licence to an energy company to extract the coal seam gas from under the ground, by drilling wells to extract the gas.

At the heart of this conflict are the methods used to extract coal seam gas: hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Under this process, vast amounts of water, chemicals and sand are pumped at high pressure down a well to fracture the coal or shale to release the gas. The water is then returned to the surface, sometimes along with the naturally occurring salty water if it is in coal seams, and the gas is collected in a pipe and sent off for processing and use.

There are several major concerns with fracking:

the high use of water in agricultural areas

the chemicals and sand used in the water

the amount of water returned to the surface (produced water)

possible damage to underground water structures (known as aquifers) as a result of the fracking process

the number of wells required to successfully extract the coal seam gas in an agricultural area

the number of trucks and service vehicles that enter a farmer’s land in order to undertake the fracking process.

Water and CSG

Water use in Australia has always been an issue, particularly in agricultural areas. The major concern for farmers, and quite rightly so, is governments’ inconsistent attitude to water conservation and management. If the federal government is attempting to restrict water use in the Murray-Darling Basin, then why are energy companies able to extract vast amounts of water (which the farmers see as important for agriculture) to undertake commercial enterprises that only profit the companies?

Related to the use of water is the real danger of damage to ground water resources. Unlike in Western Australia, NSW and Queensland are part of the huge underground water resource known as the Great Artesian Basin. The concern is that if the chemicals used in fracking enter the groundwater, there is a likelihood that groundwater could be contaminated.

The major cause of contamination of aquifers has been linked to poor fracking well construction and design. This can lead to a well leaking fracking fluids into the surrounding aquifers. Many farmers are concerned that the groundwater movement in some areas is little understood, and have called for hydrological studies to map ground water so that potential effects of fracking compounds in the water can be monitored.

2 Responses

Coal seam gas has nothing to do with our energy security, it is all to do with the gold rush mentality of making a dollar as quickly as possible. It employs very very few, and even less when the LNG plants are up and running. With the environmental damage, especially to Gladstone Harbour now matching that of the effected farmlands it becomes very very difficult to see a net beneift to Australia from this industry. How long it will take the land and world heritage waterways to recover? Maybe never. This is a toxic industry that needs to be stopped dead in its tracks before more damage occurs, ask UNESCO when they come to Gladstone in two weeks time what they think!!

What superficial city-centric nonsense. What “important” jobs? This emerging industry currently uses mainly a small number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers with little training on the job and only an even small number of on-site specialists. Ask the people who live and work in areas where CSG extraction is occurring. And what “declining” economy? The manufacturing sector may be in trouble but that is nothing new. It has been in trouble for more than two decades. However, there is no sign of a “declining” economy. Unemployment is at its lowest for decades and the population is more highly educated than in previous decades. Many of the new jobs in Australia are in export industries based around knowledge transfer not just around commodities and even more job growth can be found surprisingly in the Arts. As for coal seam gas being linked to energy security, the reality is the opposite. Its excessive use of vital resources like water and sand and the take-over of key areas of high quality arable farming and grazing land make it a high risk venture at best and a potential financial and environmental disaster at worst. The excessively rapid growth of the fledgling CSG industry in Australia is an unproven, high risk strategy by debt ridden and cash hungry governments. It is too big a gamble to be allowed to proceed without much better information and independent research. Do it!